The Last Years Of Rodin

Preface 7

taken advantage of, the man who, absorbed as he
was by his tremendous task, found time to be kind,
indulgent and gracious ; the giant of sculpture,
at times as irritable and unjust as the Olympian
gods he resembled.

.The fact that Marcelle Tirel, at the time when she
knew Rodin, did not belong, or hardly belonged to
the* intellectual world, enabled her to observe him
without being blinded by the brilliance of his
genius or the prestige of his lofty intelligence.
It was with a quizzical eye that she noted the
conduct of this exalted personality when at grips
with the details of everyday life, with people of
normal measure, with the sordid rivalries, jealousies,
and ambitions of his milieu. This contrast led to a
number of singular incidents, which she records
with remarkable vivacity and, frequently, in a
very amusing way.

At times the tone of her narrative, influenced by
its subject, rises to a higher level and becomes
really moving, as when she describes the unhappy
old age of the poor great man, and the descent of
sickness and death on his family and himself. Her
natural independence led her, without treating
Rodin as an equal, to maintain her customary
freedom of speech in her dealings with him. She
was not afraid to point out to him his errors and
follies, to lecture him and console him with the
healthy, vigorous common-sense of the servants of